I was young, it was 2017 and I wanted to circumvent bans and school restrictions. After a bit of looking around for good and cheap VPNs on YouTube, I found the two tempting choices were Tunnelbear and Windscribe but I ultimately picked Windscribe in the end. Windscribe offered a generous free tier, with codes you could enter for permanent cap increases on a free account, I have as of now 50 GBs of free bandwidth total.

Windscribe has a build-a-plan feature, for those who care only to have North American IP addresses, but do want unlimited bandwith. It’s about three bucks each month, so cheap that I stayed with Windscribe. The VPN had worked super well for me, allowing me to bypass all kinds of headaches. I could dodge bans, school restrictions, my ISP, and I could browse and access whatever I wanted.

As time went on, I saw the true use of my VPN. It became my main way to solve sites not working or loading. I’ve had pages load slow without a VPN, that load fast with it on. I’ve had sites slow down, until I changed servers. It is super excellent for circumventing a huge amount of problems. It is a key tool for accessing any content that I want, while keeping my DNS activity obfuscated to any person in the middle.

My best friend, who I suggested Windscribe to, dealt with an issue it seemingly couldn’t fix. His internet router was set up to cut off internet on off hours. I forgot the exact times but it was strict and it forced us to confine our calls and games to set times. One day I was over at his house while his parents were away, I got to see the cutoff, and his PC disconnected, but my devices still remained connected. We thought to try out the DNS spoofing feature the desktop client had. We enabled it and it solved his pesky router situation too. We now both use this service years later.

I picked Windscribe totally blindly back then, off a top ten video on YouTube, I picked whatever was cheap and well received and went with it. I even brought my friend aboard. Did it solve my issues, yes very well, but ultimately it is solely trust. The reputation of Windscribe and my good experience with the product were the main reasons I stuck with it for almost a decade despite it breaking the rule that you should never trust free VPN services. I stuck with it for so long because it worked, for so long and well too. It let me and my friend surf the internet whenever we wanted.